Invariably, when he was inclined to make of something they were talking of a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him;she made no response.Whereupon, once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very "secretive." At this she colored a little, and he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge.But even this satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in making, two or three times afterward, a softly ironical allusion to her slyness.
He told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise.
"Very good," she answered, almost indifferently, "and now please tell me again--I have forgotten it--what you said an 'architrave' was."It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts.
"You are always snatching at information," he said; "you will never consent to have any disinterested conversation."She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal.But this time she assented, and said that she knew she was eager for facts.
"One must make hay while the sun shines," she added.
"I must lay up a store of learning against dark days.
Somehow, my imagination refuses to compass the idea that Imay be in Rome indefinitely."
He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might have said to her--what it seemed impossible to say--that fortune possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain, "Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!"But all the accusations were not his.He had been watching, once, during some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page.
It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic.
The simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science.
In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of self-effacement.Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at him very frankly and began to frown.At the same time she let the Murray slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance that he made no movement to pick it up.
"You are singularly inconsistent, Mr.Mallet," she said.
"How?"
"That first day that we were in Saint Peter's you said things that inspired me.You bade me plunge into all this.
I was all ready; I only wanted a little push; yours was a great one;here I am in mid-ocean! And now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me.""Distinctly, then," said Rowland, "I strike you as inconsistent?""That is the word."
"Then I have played my part very ill."
"Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?"He hesitated a moment."That of usefulness, pure and simple.""I don't understand you!" she said; and picking up her Murray, she fairly buried herself in it.
That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention.
"Do you remember," he asked, "my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented.""Very tacitly."
"I have never yet really presumed on your consent.But now I would like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term.
I will know what you mean; a word to the wise!"One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars.Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.
It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.
The day left a deep impression on Rowland's mind, partly owing to its intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion, let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars.She had begun by saying that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad place.
The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired, she looked a little pale.
"Everything," she said, "seems to say that all things are vanity.
